Abstract

This article argues that the mobilisation of women in the German empire between 1914 and 1918 was almost wholly conditioned by male priorities and interests. In particular, the increase in the number of women employed in war-related industries represented a temporary relocation of female labour, not a permanent re-evaluation of women’s place in the workforce. There is, in addition, little evidence of a ‘self-mobilisation’ of working-class women. Nonetheless, the bourgeois and Social Democratic women’s movements were active in the construction of ‘mobilisation myths’ which are relevant to our understanding of the cultural history of the war and its aftermath.

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